Renewable baseload pivotal role in the success of energy transition

Tidal streams and ocean currents offer safe, reliable, inexhaustible locally produced renewable energy, which can form part of renewable baseload supply.

A balanced renewable energy mix is crucial in advancing the global transition towards a sustainable future energy system.

Tidal streams and ocean currents are reliable and inexhaustible, and available all over the globe. They provide several significant advantages over other renewable energy sources:

• Predictable and reliable. Unlike wind, solar and other ocean energy sources such as wave power, tides and ocean currents are almost 100% predictable. The endless flows create reliability of the future energy availability.
  
• Global: Tidal streams and ocean currents are available on all continents.
  
• Energy-rich: Moving water is about 830 times denser than moving air, creating conditions for efficient energy conversion.
  
• Minimal use of land and no visual impact: In many regions around the world, there is limited land resource for renewable energy projects. As such, onshore solutions such as wind and solar compete with other land uses. Subsea ocean energy technologies such as Minesto’s tidal technology are out of sight and do not compete for land space.

The large resource of tidal streams and ocean currents can be also exploited with relatively small environmental interaction, thereby offering one of the most lenient methods for large-scale electricity generation.

Tidal energy is a reliable and predictable source of clean energy compared to other existing renewable energy technologies, encompassing all prerequisites to develop into a significant player in the future renewable energy mix. The continuous streams mean feasibility for providing sustainable and renewable baseload power to the grid.

A summary of available data that Minesto has analysed shows that the technically exploitable potential of tidal streams and ocean currents for Minesto is more than 600GW installed capacity. This is comparable to the fact that there is currently just under 400GW of nuclear power capacity installed globally.

Minesto’s technology is developed to efficiently harvest the energy in tidal streams and ocean currents. To exploit the immense renewable resource, Minesto’s kite system technology is designed to be lightweight, modular and scalable. This unlocks a predictable renewable energy resource, which in many cases are inaccessible to other technologies.

How does Minesto’s technology work?

• Minesto’s technology generates electricity from tidal streams and ocean currents by a unique and patented principle similar to a kite flying in the wind.

• The wing uses the hydrodynamic lift force created by the underwater current to move the kite. With an onboard control system, the kite is autonomously steered in a predetermined figure-of-eight trajectory, pulling the turbine through the water at a water flow several times higher than the actual stream speed.
  
• The turbine shaft turns the generator which outputs electricity to the grid via a power cable in the tether and a seabed umbilical to the shore.

To sum up, renewable baseload is an important piece to the complex and challenging energy transition puzzle; and Minesto’s tidal technology has the potential to make significant contributions to the future renewable energy mix.

About the company
Minesto is a leading marine energy technology company with the mission to minimise the global carbon footprint of the energy industry by enabling commercial power production from the ocean. Minesto’s award-winning and patented product is the only verified marine power plant that operates cost-efficiently in areas with low-flow tidal streams and ocean currents.

https://minesto.com/